[okareaman]

I've never heard Andreesen say anything I thought was particularly insightful or intelligent. He seems like a caricature of a Silicon Valley programmer who got lucky and made a bunch of money who now thinks that makes him a genius thought leader for the rest of his life. I hate his tagline "software is eating the world" If a homeless person standing outside a grocery store said these things you wouldn't listen because the sound like the ravings of a crank.

[bko]

I would have some reverence for the man. This isn't someone who "just got lucky". We was working on the forefront of the internet with Netscape IPOing in 1995 and being bought by AOL for 4 billion in 1999.

He then went on to found another company that had a $1.6 billion exit just 4 years after the AOL acquisition.

He then ran a VC that went from 300mm to 2.7bn in three years.

I would say he knows something about the world. Maybe he doesn't know anything on certain topics or you disagree with him, or he has an ego. But to write him off as a "programmer who got lucky" is wrong, especially considering that the fields he succeeded in were very cutting edge. He didn't just invest in Manhattan real estate or some crap.

Some life advice, go into every interaction with people assuming they know something you don't. You'll get a lot farther that way.

[borroka]

He is very smart and incredibly successful. He comes across, at least to me and online, as terribly obnoxious. But he's not talking to me with his tweets, he's talking to his peers, who are other VCs, CEOs, founders, younger and emerging politicians.

He's also very nerdy - and how could he not be if he was building browsers in his 20s while I was chasing skirts or trousers at that age - and I don't get along with super nerds outside of work. It's okay at work, they tend to do better than other psychological types. Is it me or him, then? I don't know, but I muted him, his takes have zero to negative effect on my mood.

[Barrin92]

I think it's fair to give (a lot of) credit for the Netscape work, but people like Andreessen at some point have so much money and clout that in particular in the VC field they can literally make reality as they wish and turn everything into a successful exit or just absorb an almost infinite amount of failures that nobody else would get away with.

I put a lot more weight on what people do when they had no name than what they did in this industry with its personality cults once they got the ball rolling.

[robocat]

Only 5% of modern VC funds make enough to cover investor risk: https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/01/the-meeting-that-showed-me... 50% don’t even make their money back (figure is much worse when you adjust for overheads and depreciation).

Assuming that VCs are successful just because they have money is selection bias, because you mostly only hear about the successful VC funds.

Aside: VCs partners themselves can make money even if their fund doesn’t due to the 2% management fees of a normal 2+20 fund structure.

[taurath]

OTOH he gets to see what ultimately is succeeding or not, but that comes with the caveat that the metric by which what is "succeeding" is what ultimately gets more money, which he has a ton of influence over.

[okareaman]

I was responding to OP's question about how to react to the statement "Buy physical copies of any book you plan to read in the future. Do it now." I don't think OP needs to worry about it because Andreessen likes to be a cool kid on Twitter. If I need a physical copy of a book to read it then I have bigger problems than figuring out a way to read a book.

Btw - I made a bunch of money in the dotcom bubble of the late 90's and early 2000's without even trying that hard. It was like buying Bitcoin in 2013. Maybe you've forgotten that AOL bought Time-Warner for $182 billion in 2000. It was ridiculous at the time and seems even more astonishing in retrospect. Good times.

[bko]

If you said he's purposely being obtuse because he wants to be a cool kid, I wouldn't have commented and probably would have agreed.

But re-read your original comment. It was an unnecessary personal attack on someone that has accomplished a lot and presumably knows a lot:

> He seems like a caricature of a Silicon Valley programmer who got lucky and made a bunch of money who now thinks that makes him a genius thought leader for the rest of his life.

Congrats on your success. There's a difference between "making money in early 2000's" and founding a hugely influential company that helped shaped the web in the 90s. His track record as a VC is also impressive. I think he's someone definitely worth listening to as he obviously sees things differently than others, otherwise he wouldn't have been such an outlier throughout his whole career.

[sjg007]

A16Z podcasts are pretty good and I saw an interview on Bloomberg where he came across quite well. They had a clubhouse thing that seems to have stopped recently along with the clubhouse hype in general. It is hard to disambiguate the marketing and messaging around web3 vs the actual tech however. NFTs will mean a lot more in an object but not centered digital universe which we don't really have yet.

I enjoy listening to their opinions on technology and business. They also throw in stuff on leadership, history and have interesting takes on the VC industry.

All VCs have this problem of missing big bets which they seem to want to figure out how to avoid making.

[AlchemistCamp]

> He seems like a caricature of a Silicon Valley programmer who got lucky and made a bunch of money who now thinks that makes him a genius

… okareaman typed into a web browser, the very technology Andreesen became wealthy pioneering.

[okareaman]

Right, Andreessen wrote it himself without the help from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and it was a totally new idea since three other GUI browsers didn't exist and he never saw the source code for these other browsers that didn't exist

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwise

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViolaWWW

[AlchemistCamp]

Andreessen worked at NCSA and was the largest contributor to Mosaic!

He was even responsible for how various parts of the web standard coming into existence back then. For example, Tim Berners-Lee shared a different proposal than the img tag we now have. But Andreesen suggested the img tag for embedded images and shipped working code in the Mosaic browser.

After starting Netscape itself, the shift towards building entirely new technology and features only accelerated. That was an intense team effort but one he lead.

Getting so “lucky“ required working very energetically and solving difficult problems, for years.

[okareaman]

> Getting so “lucky“ required working very energetically and solving difficult problems, for years.

A lot of people work very energetically and solving difficult problems, for years, and don't get rich. Sad but true. If you are one of them, I salute you and thank you for trying to make the world a better place. And if you did get rich but realized that "money doesn't make the man" so you did your good deeds in private, I also salute you. The world would be a much worse place without people like you. Frankly, the Marc Andreessens of the world are a dime a dozen and I don't mean to disparge Marc as a private person, I'm disparging the puffed up Wizard of Oz public image that people like him build on the advice of their PR people. It's good for business I hear.

[johnthescott]

i vaguely recall that mark is on record crediting eric bina with rendering engine in mosaic. at netscape bina prefered to stay away from sv, but he was quite active on usenet, as i recall.

[WFHRenaissance]

No… lol. If I a homeless person said that, it would seem weirdly insightful for a homeless person.